Recently, a new browser war has erupted all over the internet, with various browsers making massive improvements in each release to trumpet those made by others. While Firefox certainly ignited this new browser war, Chrome is the one who started the JavaScript war. The first release of Google's web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors, forcing them to improve their JavaScript performance as well. This whole JS thing has gotten to the heads of the folks at Google, and they've created a site for experiments which show off the power of JS.

It makes me wonder whether Javascript is really suitable for this sort of thing.

Obviously not yet. Why would you want a software 3D engine written in Javascript when you've got perfectly good hardware to do that job?

But that's because browsers have so far not exploited the full power of whatever they're hosted on. Google obviously views the browser as an application platform - something I know a lot of people here disagree with. So they're trying to make the browser much more capable.

I believe it's just a case of Google looking a what people are trying to do with Javascript and improving the performance of that in their browser. How successful they will be in that endeavour has yet to be seen. I wish them luck.